Always Look Ahead

Happy Sunday! I am so thankful for all the support I got on last week’s post, and I was truly shocked by the amount of people that actually visited the website (I am sort of obsessed with the analytics tab I get to look at on my end). This week I really want to dive into what this website is for, and I hope you close out of this site feeling like you learned something, or at the very least were a little entertained.

I have recently become enthralled with the myth, tale, legend, whatever you want to call it, of Orpheus and Eurydice. In one of my English courses, we studied Ovid’s version in his poem, Metamorphoses, which I adored. We also studied Sir Orfeo, author unknown, but as far as I’m concerned, that story has a semi happy ending, so it doesn’t really work in my whole “tragedy obsession era” for right now. (It is entirely debatable if Sir Orfeo actually has a happy ending, based on if you view it from Heurodis’s perspective. It doesn’t seem like she got everything she wanted like her husband did considering she lost ten years of her life to the Faerie King, but that’s for another day.)

This day in class was the moment I knew I was going into the right field. I figured out what I wanted to do for my career around the fourth week of my first Shakespeare class (Much Ado About Nothing really sold me), but I realized I might be a little obsessed when I left our Orpheus and Eurydice discussion and immediately went home to research. Specifically? I needed to know if there was any connection to their story and the story of Lot and his wife from the Bible. 

Now, I can’t imagine anyone in my class was wondering that, seeing as I can’t imagine anyone in my class has a vast knowledge of the Old Testament, let alone the Book of Genesis. I, however, had the very interesting upbringing experience of being raised Southern Baptist, so for better or for worse, that knowledge is stuck with me for life. 

I might be getting ahead of myself. If you aren’t familiar, allow me to summarize both stories for you. 

In this classic Greek myth, Orpheus is this guy who is super talented musically and is just incredible at playing his lyre. His beloved wife, Eurydice, is out one day – their wedding day – and gets a fatal snakebite. Orpheus is crushed, absolutely destroyed, so naturally, he does what I can imagine all of our loving partners would do: he travels to the underworld to plead with Pluto (or Hades, kind of the same difference, kind of not). At first, Pluto and Persephony say, “Absolutely not.” Then Orpheus, again doing what I’m sure anyone would do, plays his lyre and is just so good and talented that Pluto says, “Okay fine, take your wife.” Orpheus, ever the optimist, is thrilled, but there is one condition, or something that we call “prohibition.” He is not allowed to look back at his wife until they reach the surface. I’m sure you can see where this is leading. Unfortunately, due to reasons I could spend a thousand words or more discussing, Orpheus looks back to see his beautiful wife, and she immediately falls back down to the underworld, never to be seen again, leaving Orpheus to mourn the loss of her forever. 

Tragic, I know, and the story of Lot and his wife is pretty similar. This story is found in Genesis Chapter 19, and essentially two angels visited Lot, his wife, and their daughters and told them that they needed to flee their home of Sodom before God destroyed it. Their prohibition was that they were not allowed to look back at the city they were fleeing, exactly like Orpheus. As they were fleeing though, Lot’s wife (we never really get her name, but in some Jewish traditions it’s believed to be Ado or Edith) turns around, disobeying the angels’ command, and she is then turned into a pillar of salt.

So, just from reading both summaries, I’m sure you’re able to understand why I immediately wanted to make a connection there. I mean, both stories are crazy similar. But I wasn’t sure if it was just a coincidence, seeing as that general theme used to be relatively common. Finding a real connection requires a little bit of research, but don’t worry! I did all of that for you already. 

Alright, the Book of Genesis is believed to have been written around 1400 BCE, with its final version being finished much later – around 400 BCE. There are multiple different arguments for this, though, but the one thing that we can agree on is that it is super old. Genesis is part of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, so it’s been around – and talked about – for an extremely long time. Metamorphoses by Ovid however, was written in Latin in 8 AD, which is 407 years after Genesis is said (by some) to be finished. 

While there are multiple centuries between the two, there is no proof that Ovid actually even read the Bible, but some people believe that he may have been influenced by a telling of it. It would have been rather difficult though, because the first widespread edition of the Bible was not assembled until around 400 AD by St. Jerome. But! That goes for the entire Bible. For the Old Testament, aka where Genesis is found, that was written before Jesus was even born and most likely was scattered around the Roman Empire during his time. There was also a Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, that was made available during the Hellenistic period (323 BCE-31 BCE). 

Genuinely very proud of you for making it through the technicalities. So, here’s the thing: the very first version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that we know of doesn’t include the prohibition. In fact, Virgil (Roman poet, famous for writing Aeneid) actually put that part in himself in his book, The Georgics, published around 29 BCE.

So, aside from that, the story isn’t technically a good match for Lot and his wife. With Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice is the one that dies even though it was Orpheus’s mistake. Lot’s wife decides to look back entirely on her own, knowing that her decision will not kill her family, just herself. 

Unsurprisingly, I am not the only person who has ever had this thought before. I was actually lucky enough to find much of this information from a 2008 study by Jan Bremmer that really analyzes this question in detail, and if you’re interested, I’ll try to link an online version below (full transparency, I did pay for mine because I’m obsessed, but I’ll try my very best). 

Anyway, with all thousand or so words said, I’ve come to the conclusion that the similarities are purely coincidental. This doesn’t shock me because it’s pretty common for multiple people across time and the world to have similar ideas and thoughts, but it makes sense that this is not a question only I had. 

Regardless, I still think both stories are super interesting, and really do an excellent job at making the reader think about what the idea of “not looking back” suggests. From a Christianity standpoint, I believe that Lot’s story is really about not wanting to return to “worldly things,” and instead trusting God. So it can then be argued that Lot’s wife did indeed not trust God, and therefore she was killed just like God promised. Orpheus, on the other hand, was most likely overcome with doubt and fear and love, and probably wasn’t able to trust that the love of his life was truly right behind him, so he felt like he had to turn around. Tragic, I know, but I think that’s the most realistic part of the entire story.

My point in all of this? Well, as an English major, we learn pretty quickly that all literature builds on other literature. Writers from the Dark Ages would frequently take inspiration from religion, folklore, Greek mythology, etc., and that only becomes more true the closer we get to modern times. It is almost impossible to read something from hundreds of years ago and understand what they are saying if you don’t have general classics knowledge, or at least know a thing or two about Christianity and Greek Mythology. Even in Shakespeare, I can’t even count the amount of times Jove gets mentioned, let alone any Christian allusions spread throughout. Understanding what classical writers are talking about is the first step to being able to decode and understand their messages. So while this may seem boring to some of you, I guarantee that next time you see a Twitter post or a TikTok or Broadway musical that references Orpheus and Eurydice (because believe me, there are more out there than you think), you’ll know exactly what they mean. 

If you take any advice from this post, let it be this: if you ever find yourself being told to look ahead and not go backwards, be sure to listen. See you next Sunday.

— Lindsey Hoover

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Works Cited

Jan Bremmer, Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East, 2008